No Backlog
When you are experiencing a high number of calls, even if your agents are working hard to take every call possible, some kind of backlog and increased waiting time is to be expected. A small backlog can be dealt with by call routing and overstaffing, however, if it increases, it adds to the stress of the agents, results in unhappy customers and the service levels go downhill.
Apart from calls, backlog can be of email support tickets with some customers contacting you again and again increasing the number of tickets and overtime, this can become a huge burden for a call center to handle. It negatively impacts your benchmarks and creates unhappy customers. All goes downhill from there.
What is a normal Backlog?
A backlog is an effective way to determine the efficacy of your call center support process and team. With calculating your backlog, you can calculate if you have enough staff, how to handle repetitive issues and if your team needs training. It is important to understand the type of backlog that exists in your queue and the reason why is it there. We train our ChatPandas to effectively deal with the backlog and reduce the backlog queue to zero the same day. If they are able to do so, that is normal backlog and it is to be expected.
Handling Backlog Data Demon
Backlog data can be handled with smart tools and a smart approach. Backlogs can happen with slow handling of the incoming requests and inefficacy of agents, higher influx of requests from usual, overworked agents or wrong prioritization. Backlog can be handled by the following steps:
Streamlined Classification
It is important to classify and organize all backlog requests and forward them to relevant agents to keep them updated about the after call tasks. Streamlining call log can also help with workforce management and help designation of tasks to those agents who are not overworked.
Pick Priority
Backlogs can alse be categorized on the basis of priority. It includes those queries which needs to be answered on urgent basis or customers who have been waiting for a long time or who did repeated calls to get their queries resolved. We can exclude those callers whose call dropped within the first 5 seconds and term them as wrong calls. After prioritizing on the basis of urgency, all calls are forwarded to relevant department for instant resolution of the issue.
Proactive Automated Response
We have automated call back, text or email response by agents to those customers whose calls were dropped due to long waiting times or who didn’t call back. We make sure to get back to the customer, asking for their issues and making sure to empathize with the most distraught of the customers.
Carve a Niche
We encourage all our ChatPandas to try their expertise by not only resolving common issues but also expanding their horizons by trying to solve complex issues by the customers. Resolving easy queries gives them a sense of achievement while switching towards complex issues makes them more experienced and trained to solve even more complex queries.
Trash the Sweepings
After prioritizing the calls, calling back the customers whose calls were dropped and forwarding the calls to the relevant departments, we eliminate the calls which were dropped within the first 5 seconds and label them as wrong numbers. We also eliminate those customers who didn’t reply even after the follow up contact and those customers who gave incomplete details in their tickets. This helps in reducing our backlog and also reduces workload on our agents.